Manon de Boer & Latifa Laâbissi – Persona, 2022

Exchange and the “cannibalising” of shared influences have shaped the collaboration between filmmaker Manon de Boer and dancer and choreographer Latifa Laâbissi since 2015. Their work explores the ghosts that inhabit artistic practice and the many voices that continue to inhabit other bodies. In Persona, Laâbissi returns to her 2012 performance Écran Somnambule, itself a re-enactment of the surviving fragment of dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz (1926). Stretching Wigman’s unruly reimagining of femininity from two minutes to thirty-two, she allows the fragment to take on new form within another body and another time. De Boer replaces the fixed perspective of the stage with a camera that circles continuously around the masked performer, following the sinuosity of her movements and the snake-like quality of her costume. Only the performer’s breathing can be heard.

With a practice of sculpture and video installation, Manon de Boer explores the relationship between time and perception. The artist develops works often centred on artists, dancers, and musicians, in which sound and listening occupy a central place.

Choreographer, dancer, and performer, Latifa Laâbissi’s work explores margins, minority narratives, dissident bodies, and forgotten forms of cultural history, turning the stage into a space of reappearance and metamorphosis.